Time horizons
Each of us creates our experience of the world by choosing where we direct our attention. This can fuel a personal competitive advantage. One example is changing your time horizon.
If you’re constantly comparing yourself to others and criticizing yourself for not being further along “by now”, you’re inviting more of this into your life. You’re literally forging neural connections that will lead you to seek out supporting evidence for this belief. It’s a compounding negative feedback loop.
Playing with how much time you have for something will reshape your entire experience of it. Humans have an incredibly elastic sense of time. We overestimate how much we can accomplish in a short period, but underestimate over the long run.
Graham Duncan writes:
What if there was no promised land of security and control on the other side of making a billion dollars? How would your climate in the skull change if that were your default belief? Does it extend your time horizon, injecting spaciousness around a given decision?
Two of the most successful founders of our time both created an edge by editing their time horizons away from the norm.
Tobi Lütke, co-founder and CEO of Shopify, says:
When I hire someone at Shopify we can make the assumption that we work together for a decade. There are a lot of things that changes. And most of Shopify's advantage comes from there. For example: The value equation changes entirely. In some places average tenure is only 18 months. Yes, you might want to work everyone 80 hours to make that work. On-boarding is expensive so you skip it. You need value day 1. The relationship is exploitative. We don't need that. We can hire on future potential and help people get there quickly. Junior employees are put together with seasoned vets and sometimes coaches to help them get there. We are all on the same side of the table and want the same.
Jeff Bezos says:
If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that.
Most people are in the comparison and hustle pressure cooker, striving to visibly do more and have more to signal their status. But compounding personal advantages are often invisible. Learning, writing, building relationships…approaching these activities on a 20 or 30 year time horizon removes the pressure for short-term achievements. It goes hand-in-hand with an “infinite game” mindset: if you frame the game you’re playing as one that will go on forever (enjoyably), then the time horizon is infinite.
I love this Naval-ism: impatience with action, patience with results. Don’t wait to become who you want to be (for instance, be kind and curious today), but also, don’t wait for a certain outcome or for external validation.